A couple years of ago, I noticed that many of my nonprofit technology colleagues who were early adopters of social media were also dog owners. I created a mini workshop called “The Cute Dog Theory,” inspired by Ethan Zuckerman’s “Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism” which was the title of one of his talks.

That’s about when I also started following folks who were doing social media for animal welfare organizations, like colleagues Carie Lewis and Jon Dunn – and when I discovered ASPCAPRO. It’s where I found the above really useful screencast.

You need to export your content first because once you switch, it only converts your profile photo and changes friends into fans. If you’re ready to get started, read this excellent post by the ASPCAPRO blog

I posted this link on my Facebook page and it generated a lot of comments, so I thought I’d cross post it here.

Thanks so much for posting this, Beth. For Claire and others, I also have three more videos that walk you through the process of finding and downloading that ZIP file, then actually converting your profile to a page, then what to do with the ZIP file that you download from Facebook. So this tells you what to do AFTER you start the data download process! Check it out here if this might be helpful to you! http://tinyurl.com/fbconversion

Beth,
I have a slightly different situation but thought you might have some advice. I just started working for a small nonprofit that has a FB page for one of our programs (sort of a sub-brand) but not for our organization as a whole. The name just has an extra word on the end. Since we have more than 100 fans (we have 167), I can’t just change the name of the page which I would love to do. Maintaining two pages doesn’t make sense. I really want to just have a FB page to reflect our main brand since it’s only a few years old and we don’t have a lot of recognition as it is. Should I start a new page and try to get current fans to “like” the new one? (but then I still have to maintain both) Should I try to contact Facebook administrators and beg them to let me change it? Any ideas or advice?

Mary–one organization I work with has gone through this exact same thing. We were not successful in contacting Facebook and getting them to change anything; in fact, I don’t know if you even CAN contact Facebook about things like this, unless it involves fraud or identify theft or something (I may be wrong!).

I would say since you only have 197 fans, cut your losses and create a new page. Put repeated requests on your existing page–with an expiration date–telling fans to go become a fan of the new page (and give them the URL). Tell them they need to do it by such and such date, because this page will be deleted. Then you can delete that page and focus your efforts on the new page.

You’ll lose some fans, but that’s not so bad. Once you have your page with the correct organization name, you’ll find you get more fans anyway!

The only reason to stay with your existing page would be if you CAN get Facebook to change the name, OR if the name is similar enough that you can keep it. If it’s not really a big deal, then I don’t see it as a strong reason to scrap your page and start over. Without knowing the details of the name, I couldn’t say.

But my vote is for creating a new page, because it’s so, so important to be easily found on Facebook–and the best way to help people find you is to have the correct name.